|
Level -> And now... the news. (8/21/2007 4:04:28 PM)
|
NEW YORK - Mayor Michael Bloomberg said — again — that he's not running for president, adding in a television interview that he wouldn't win anyway.
"Nobody's going to elect me president of the United States," he told Dan Rather for a program that will air Tuesday on cable's HDNet channel. "What I'd like to do is to be able to influence the dialogue. I'm a citizen."
The billionaire left the Republican Party recently to become an independent, throwing into overdrive the speculation that he will make a run for the White House.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20370679
WASHINGTON - The CIA’s top leaders failed to use their available powers, never developed a comprehensive plan to stop al-Qaida and missed crucial opportunities to thwart two hijackers in the run-up to Sept. 11, the agency’s own watchdog concluded in a bruising report released Tuesday.
Completed in June 2005 and kept classified until now, the 19-page executive summary finds extensive fault with the actions of senior CIA leaders and others beneath them. “The agency and its officers did not discharge their responsibilities in a satisfactory manner,” the CIA inspector general found.
“They did not always work effectively and cooperatively,” the report stated.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20378187
GILLETTE, Wyo. - He rode his mule into town looking for work.
No, it wasn’t the opening scene of a Western movie. It was what Rod Maday did last week, ending a six-week odyssey from his hometown of Boy River, Minn.
“I’ve done about 1,500 miles and I’ve got the saddle sores to prove it,” he said.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20369436
WASHINGTON - A top Senate Democrat on Monday threatened to hold members of the Bush administration in contempt for not producing subpoenaed information about the legal justification for President Bush's secretive eavesdropping program.
"When the Senate comes back in the session, I'll bring it up before the committee," said Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt. and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. "I prefer cooperation to contempt. Right now, there's no question that they are in contempt of the valid order of the Congress."
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20370705
TEHRAN, Iran - A detained Iranian-American academic accused of conspiring against the government was freed on bail Tuesday from the Tehran prison where she had been jailed since early May, a top judiciary official said.
Haleh Esfandiari, director of the Middle East program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, has been jailed largely incommunicado at Tehran’s Evin prison on charges of acting against national security.
Mohammad Shadabi, an official at the Tehran prosecutor’s office, told The Associated Press she was freed on $333,000 bail. Shadabi said he could not say whether Esfandiari would be allowed to leave Iran.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20373335
BRASILIA, Brazil - Brazil will invest nearly $3.3 billion on new prisons and social programs over the next five years in an effort to reduce violence, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said Monday.
The Justice Ministry plan calls for the construction of 160 prisons, scholarships for police officers and an expansion of social programs in poor areas where crime is rising, such as in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Silva said.
The initiative will also focus on battling corruption and other sources of crime, but will not increase the 575,000 police officers on the streets in Latin America’s largest country or upgrade their equipment.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20369461
MOSCOW - Russia’s military chief told the Czech Republic it would be making a “big mistake” to host a U.S. missile defense shield on its soil and urged Prague on Tuesday to delay a decision until a new U.S. president is elected.
The Czech Republic is discussing hosting a radar station which would form part of the U.S. missile shield -- a system designed to intercept and destroy missiles from “rogues states” but which Moscow sees as a threat to its security.
“We say it will be a big mistake by the Czech government to put this radar site on Czech territory,” said Yuri Baluyevsky, the Russian military chief of staff, after meeting the Czech deputy defense minister, Martin Bartak.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20370384
The nation's mortgage crisis worsened last month as thousands of homeowners across the country failed to keep up with their monthly payments and faced the possibility of losing their homes.
Foreclosures rose 9 percent in July compared with June and were up 93 percent from a year ago, according to the latest monthly figures released Tuesday by RealtyTrac, a Web site that tracks foreclosed properties.
Nearly 180,000 fillings — including default notices, auction sale notices and bank repossessions — were reported during the month. That means that one in every 693 U.S. households was hit with foreclosure in July.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20364043
ST. PAUL Minn. - A groundbreaking Minnesota law is shining a rare light into the big money that drug companies spend on members of state advisory panels who help select which drugs are used in Medicaid programs for the poor and disabled.
Those panels, most comprised of physicians, hold great sway over the $28 billion spent on drugs each year for Medicaid patients nationwide. But aside from Minnesota, only Vermont and Maine require drug companies to report payments to doctors for lectures, consulting, research and other services.
An Associated Press review of records in Minnesota found that a doctor and a pharmacist on the eight-member state panel simultaneously got big checks — more than $350,000 to one — from pharmaceutical companies for speaking about their products.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20379563
|
|
|
|
